AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File
Even as President Joe Biden argues for stricter gun laws, his son Hunter is planning on citing the Second Amendment in the event he’s charged with lying about his drug use to purchase a firearm in 2018.
The younger Biden is being investigated by the Department of Justice for his purchase of a gun after filling out a federal form on which he indicated that he was not using illegal drugs. He has since admitted to using crack cocaine at the time, writing in his 2021 memoir that he “was smoking crack every 15 minutes.” Federal law prohibits drug users from owning guns and also imposes penalties for lying in the paperwork Biden filled out.
But Biden’s lawyers have already informed the DOJ that if their client is charged, he will challenge the constitutionality of that prohibition according to Politico, which reports that they intend to use the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen to make his case.
In Bruen, the Court held that “modern firearms regulations” must be “consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.”
“To determine whether a firearm regulation is consistent with the Second Amendment,” the Court explained that the relevant metrics are “whether modern and historical regulations impose a comparable burden on the right of armed self-dense, and second, whether that regulator burden is comparably justified.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden boasted that “in 1993, he shepherded through Congress the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the background check system that has since kept more than 3 million firearms out of dangerous hands,” the same law his son would be found to have violated if he is found guilty of lying about his drug use to obtain the weapon he did.
President Biden has repeatedly called for stricter gun laws as president, declaring in a speech before a joint session of Congress in 2021 that “we need more Senate Republicans to join with the overwhelming majority of their Democratic colleagues, and close loopholes and require background checks to purchase a gun.” Earlier this year after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Biden accused Republicans of meeting “this epidemic with a shrug.”
Biden has also mounted vigorous defenses of Hunter Biden as investigations into his gun and potential tax crimes continue apace, insisting that he’s “done nothing wrong.”
The post Hunter Biden Will Cite Second Amendment Right if Charged With Breaking Gun Law His Father ‘Shepherded’ Through Congress first appeared on Mediaite.